My Exciting Life in ROCK (part 2): 28/8/2004 August My Mum's Back Garden, Peterborough

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Back gardens, living rooms - these are the staples of the roll call of ROCK, and the series continues APACE with this performance in the delightful village of MAXEY (just outside the none-less-delightful city of Peterborough) which is where my parents live.

It was their Silver Wedding Anniversary and so myself and The Ring On My Finger headed up to see them, also to meet with two of my GRATE PALS from school, Mr Robin Hare and Mr Paul Myland. The three of us had been in our first BAND together, "The Masters Of Nothing", from the ages of 11 to 18 and had managed to remain friends since the break-up by agreeing that, actually, we were crap. They also brought with them their Surprisingly Lovely Wives. I say "Surprisingly Lovely" because, well, I knew these two chaps at SCHOOL. Including when we were 13. The fact that ANY woman would want to even be NEAR them shocks me sometimes let alone GRATE ones who would MARRY them. Maybe high scores on Manic Miner ARE attractive to GURLS after all?

Rather foolishly I'd agreed to sing a few songs at the do, and the closer I got to The Big Day the more SCARED I became. Whenever I have ANXIETY DREAMS about GIGS it is always the same sort of thing - going down REALLY badly in front of a crowd of people who want me to get off stage I eventually tire of all the heckles to shout back a volley of abuse, only to realise too late that the entire crowd is made up of members of my family and that my Nan, looking HORRIFIED, is sitting in the middle row. It's bad enough as a nightmare, but now it looked liked coming horribly TRUE. All I could do was make sure that, in real life, I DID remember to put some trousers on.

In order to try and alleviate some of THE FEAR I persuaded my Mr Myland to join me on stage. People who've heard some of my songs may know him better as "Mileage", whose wedding reception features heavily in "Do The Indie Kid" and whose father appears giving SAGE advice in "The Gay Train". As I say, I have known him a LONG LONG time, and part of that time involved us being in The Durham Ox Singers together. The Durham Ox Singers, as I believe I have previously noted (HERE), were an acappella band made up of pub regulars singing The Hits Of The Avant Garde. They'd also done backing vocals on the first Validators' album so I reckoned that having Mileage singing along would a) improve the overall sound and b) at least give me somebody else to blame if it all went wrong.

RIDDLED with fear we took to the PATIO, where we soon discovered that Mileage provided a THIRD valuable service on stage - CHAMPAGNE WRANGLER. He'd taken a bottle along with him for moral support (it was a BIG do!) which enabled him, after every song, to pass it over to me for a GIANT SWIG. This not only LOOKED good, but FELT good, and I hope one day he will be able to come on the ROAD with me to carry out these VITAL duties. The SWAGGERING CONFIDENCE engendered by the two of us GUZZLING BUBBLES also helped me to realise that my DREAMS were missing out some of the subtleties of an audience of FAMILY i.e. when you're RELATED to people you can pretty much say what you like, and that taking the mickey out of your Drunken Dancing Auntie, far from SHOCKING your Grandmother, will actually make her LARF.

The singing and BOOZE was so much fun that later on myself, Mileage, Robin and our respective LIFE PARTNERS moved into the house for a bit of a PRIVATE SING-ALONG. Halfway through I remembered that I still knew how to play a Masters Of Nothing song, one by Robin called "Rather Spooky" which I'd played for YEARS in my next band VOON. For some inexplicable reason he'd never played our original recording of it to his wife - perhaps because it was basically three rather excited teenagers with voices wobbling like fire alarms going "RatHER SPOOkyyy, RATHer SPOOOky!" for two minutes - and she was amazed to find out he'd written it. He'd managed to get a girl to marry him WITHOUT even playing her the songs he'd written? I was IMPRESSED!

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